Mayoral candidate Roxanne Qualls listens to community members during a meeting at the Camp Washington Neighborhood Center. / The Enquirer/ Amanda Davidson

Written by

Jane Prendergast

Your Enquirer Vote team

Experienced reporters Jane Prendergast, Sharon Coolidge, Cindi Andrews, Jason Williams, James Pilcher and others will do the work so you have what you need to vote in Cincinnati's city elections this November: • The Basics: All the news the candidates make. • The Background: Candidates’ backgrounds and where they stand on the issues. • The Truth: We will fact-check and truth squad what the candidates say, and do in-depth watchdog reporting and investigations. • The Choice: Attend and watch our candidate forums and debates and use our interactive tools online to help you decide. Always let us know what you need. Contact one of the reporters or political editor Carl Weiser at cweiser@enquirer.com.

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Roxanne Qualls wants Cincinnati voters to consider her the consistent candidate, the one they can trust.

And the one who has always been – and always will be – a true Democrat.

Both she and John Cranley have been endorsed by the Democratic Party in the past. But in this race between two frontrunners who’ve always fared well in a big field in races for City Council, Qualls says she’s the one really sticking to Democratic ideals. That may very well be important on Election Day in a city in which Barack Obama got 74 percent of the vote last year.

Stressing she’s the real Democrat is a key part of her strategy for winning in November. The rest of it: Emphasizing her neighborhood work; mobilizing people who support the streetcar and parking lease, as she does; and keeping the supportive base she has built over the past 30 years, the base that chose her first in every council race she’s ever run in.

She’s also touting her labor endorsements: International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 212; Laborers Local 265; Carpenters Local 2; and Ironworkers Local 44.

“She is the Democrat in this race,” said Jens Sutmoller, her campaign manager. “But we’re also very confident that there’s a broad coalition of support for Roxanne.”

Most of council’s Democrats have lined up behind her. She has the backing of Yvette Simpson, Laure Quinlivan, Wendell Young, and Chris Seelbach; Councilwoman Pamula Thomas and her husband, Cecil, are hosting a fundraiser for Qualls next month.

Qualls’ support has been in place for years, said Gene Beaupre, a longtime politics watcher and political science teacher at Xavier University.

“I think her base is something that has developed brick by brick over a long period of time,” he said. “I’ve always felt Roxanne built her constituency almost one vote at a time.”

Qualls was mayor from 1993 to 1999 and has been back on City Council since 2007. She had been running sort of a Rose Garden campaign, an old political reference meaning to act like an incumbent and do things a challenger can only promise.

For example, Qualls last week sent an email to City Manager Milton Dohoney telling him she wants recommendations Aug. 5 for achieving a structurally balanced budget in 2016. The city’s budget hasn’t been structurally balanced in more than a decade.She’s also holding weekly “Neighborhood Office Hours With Vice Mayor Qualls” on Saturdays. In announcing those, she reminds that when she was mayor, she started Mayor’s Night In, inviting people to City Hall to tell her their concerns.

Initially, she wasn’t feeling the need to match Cranley’s quantity of press releases and press conferences with responses. Doing so wouldn’t really be her style anyway.

But now that council is on summer recess and the start of early voting comes Aug. 6, she has been fighting back more. At a forum last week hosted by the new Human Services Chamber of Hamilton County, she repeatedly referred to her consistency and to sticking to the facts – implying, of course, that Cranley doesn’t do either. He takes issue with that.

In the last three weeks, she sent out a press release blasting the proposed charter amendment to reform the city’s pension system as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Opponents insist she’s more engaged now because polling must show her to be doing poorly. Sutmoller rolled his eyes at that suggestion. The campaign always planned to switch things up eventually, he said, and expected the right timing would be summer.

“She’s definitely coming after me,” Cranley said after their forum last week. He welcomes it.

Of course there are two headline-grabbing issues on which Qualls and Cranley differ: the streetcar and parking lease. Cranley says they’re a waste of money at a time the city doesn’t have money to spare and a sellout to Wall Street, respectively. Qualls says they’re keys to developing Cincinnati’s future.

She takes on issues that aren’t necessarily sexy, Beaupre said, like form-based codes (an alternative to traditional zoning). Those kinds of things draw very passionate neighborhood activists who are likely to vote.